In the Dark by Mark Billingham
Little Brown, £14.99; 370pp Buy the book here

The Turnaround by George Pelecanos
Orion, £12.99; 265pp Buy the book here

All the Colours of Darkness by Peter Robinson
Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99; 407pp Buy the book here

Angels Unaware by Mike Ripley
Allison & Busby, £19.99; 397pp Buy the book here

Mark Billingham has (I hope temporarily) set aside his compelling series featuring Detective Inspector Tom Thorne and given us instead In the Dark, a stunning novel demonstrating an even greater mastery of his craft.

The milieu is still much the same, the world of cops and villains, but shedding the formula imposed by police procedure has clearly allowed Billingham the freedom to explore deeper emotions and portray a wider slice of life.

To prove his gang-worthiness, Theo, a young black man, under cover of a wet, London night, fires his gun at a car, causing it to swerve and mount the pavement, killing a bystander. The victim turns out to be Paul Hopwood, a policeman off duty, whose girlfriend Helen Weeks, also a police officer, is two weeks from giving birth to their baby.

The novel follows the parallel, disparate lives of Theo and Helen as the birth approaches. She had not been happy with Hopwood recently, and gradually finds out that her lover was not who he appeared to be. The two main characters are sensitively portrayed, and I know of no other British writer with Billingham's feel for the convincing dialogue of the crime world, whether it emanates from coppers, young black delinquents or ageing white gangsters from a bygone era. The final twist is brilliantly clever and shocking.

In The Turnaround, George Pelecanos is in subdued, reflective mood; the novel is no less powerful for that. He tells a modest, poignant story of guilt and - perhaps - redemption, and of how a casual incident long ago has affected successive generations. Like almost all of Pelecanos's tales of Washington DC, race is at the heart. It is 1972, and three white teenagers, bored and stoned, drive into a poor black neighbourhood and shout racist insults. The upshot is a vicious fight with three local youths.

One white kid runs away, another is shot dead. Alex Pappas is facially disfigured. A black youngster goes to prison for ten years for the shooting, but his brother, Raymond Monroe, remains respectable; the third becomes a career criminal. All their lives are irrevocably changed. Now, 35 years later, Pappas, a good man, has taken over his father's diner. One of his two sons has been killed in the war in Iraq. Monroe, also a good man, works in the hospital for wounded war veterans; his son is fighting in Afghanistan. The two men, damaged in different ways, meet accidentally, and many lives are changed again. There is no glib conclusion. This may not be one of Pelecanos's most in-your-face novels, but in its quiet way it is just as truthful and provocative.

All the Colours of Darkness - Peter Robinson's latest and Chief Inspector Banks's 18th appearance (thus overtaking Rankin's Rebus) - begins with the body of Mark Hardcastle, the popular gay set designer for a local theatre, hanging from a tree in nearby woods. Not long afterwards, his rich lover is found in his luxurious house, brutally battered to death with a cricket bat. It appears to be a clear case of murder followed by the killer's suicide, and Banks is

annoyed at being hauled back to Yorkshire from his love-in weekend with his new London paramour. But as he investigates further his instinct suggests a more complicated solution. His superiors do not share his doubts, and seem strangely anxious to close the file quickly. A mysterious visitor urges Banks to do the same. He's ordered off the case, but stubbornly continues to inquire, helped unofficially by his former colleague and love-interest, DI Annie Cabbot. The writing is well up to the author's high standard, but the plot this time is - very unusually for Robinson - uneasily unconvincing.

In 20 years, Mike Ripley has written 15 very funny crime novels without reaching the sales or recognition he deserves. His hero, Fitzroy Maclean Angel, private eye, black-cab driver, drinker, jazz trumpeter, womaniser and louche layabout, is one of British crime fiction's great comic creations. In Angels Unaware, though, he's married, with a baby. Responsibility threatens, but is soon waved away when he attends a funeral and is drawn into trouble and danger. But never mind the plot. Just laugh.

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